screens on screens, on screens
the hot new instagram trend is acknowledging the practical in the digital
Some thoughts…
I screen you screen we all screen for more screens. The world is increasingly digital (no kidding) and social media/the Internet increasingly visual (kidding? none) and yet there are still the remnants of digital denial. Or more accurately, pretending we aren’t holding our phones all the time.
At a wedding I went to in December, before the start of the ceremony, one of the members of the wedding party explained that the photographer would capture many, many photographs of the event, and the couple would rather those photographs not include us, the guests, on our phones, taking our own, worse pictures. Rectangles in front of everyone’s faces are hard to Photoshop out. Good, smart, correct, probably a standard edict at weddings going forward.
But for less formal but still pic-worthy events, if you take a candid shot of a group, you’re likely to capture at least one other person doing the same thing. There’s this weird cognitive dissonance (or maybe artistic paradoxy? I left Columbia before Art Hum, I don’t have the vocab for this!)…what we are trying to take a picture of is what the eye sees, right? A snapshot of the moment as it is viewed/remembered. But we are by definition not looking at the subject. of the photo as it is taken. We are looking at the screen display of the thing taking the picture.
When you snap a selfie with the front-facing camera, you have to remember to stare not at yourself but at the lens, or you get a picture of someone looking just slightly away. We are trying to compensate for the fact that we are taking a picture, to capture the image of someone…not taking a picture.
There was a time, during the early days of quarantine, when influencers were running out of ways to take pictures in their apartments, so they moved mirrors outside. Something new in the reflection and around the frame. If having the thing taking the picture in the picture was necessary, it was acceptable as long as we got creative about it, to the point that it became its own aesthetic choice. There were, briefly, rumors that some celebrities were faking mirror selfies by holding up their phones while a professional snapped a good shot.
Gen Z is really good at navigating this. Raised on their phones, they accept that devices are part of the world, not something to be cropped out or disguised. To them, a picture of what’s happening is supposed to include the screen itself. And since they spend as much time looking at images of the world on a screen as they do looking at the world, why not take a picture of the screen? It’s just as honest as the picture “of” the world. Hence the trend I’ve spotted cropping up all over Instagram: a picture of a picture on a phone (not limited to Gen Z):
Why not keep the phone in the picture? Why not make it the center of the picture? Recording is the activity; capture it as such.
This is the natural outgrowth of the lo-fi aesthetic that’s always been popular online, a graininess from either film or screen-to-screen distortion that’s a little more forgiving and flattering that the flattening of an iPhone pic. You can do it on your computer…
A camcorder…
Or even an old cellphone, to really drive the idea home.
See how a picture of text looks so much cooler on your screen when you can also see the rippling on the poster’s screen. You’re both looking at something together, you see what they see, not what they post.
A couple years ago, I saw that some Insta girls were getting around the phones-in-the-pic thing by using the front-facing camera in their mirror pictures, creating an endless loop of smaller and smaller versions of themselves. It was kinda genius. Instead of ceding precious picture space to the rectangular deadspot of the back of your phone, use that real estate for a mini-version of yourself!
Warning: earnest Lizzie pics ahead…
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I experimented with the trend and liked the results, though it really only works with a big enough mirror.
All of which is to say, I don’t think smart phones are going anywhere, and if the artistic lesson is to embrace them as a medium, maybe we can apply this to other parts of our lives? Make screen time work for you.
Something to think about!
Lizzie (selfie-mode)